Principal speaker
Ian Maclean
THIS EVENT IS CANCELLED - The modern debates about the term ‘legalism’ (‘the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules’, according to the definition given by Judith Shklar) initially concentrated on the relationship between law and politics, but have more recently played a part in such fields as critical legal studies (on the indeterminacy of rules, e.g. Tushnet 1983) and anthropology (Dresch and Skoda 2012). I propose to look at a historical moment (the Early Modern Period) before the term ‘legalism’ was coined, and to see whether discussions in various disciplines (jurisprudence, theology, natural philosophy) about the concepts of law and rules can shed any light on these modern debates.